Flame-Coloured Taffeta Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Chapter 1: ‘Spanish Ladies’

  Chapter 2: In which Damaris finds her Smuggler

  Chapter 3: The Wise Woman

  Chapter 4: Skills and Remedies

  Chapter 5: Tom Wildgoose

  Chapter 6: The Oilskin Packet

  Chapter 7: Mr Farrington’s Hunting

  Chapter 8: The Wicked Thing

  Chapter 9: ‘Dame’s Folly’

  Chapter 10: His Majesty’s Customs

  Chapter 11: A Time for Parting

  Chapter 12: Voices in the Waggon Shelter

  Chapter 13: Wish on a Shooting Star

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Damaris Crocker had not lived her twelve years in smuggling country without knowing when a Run was planned. This night smugglers would bring more than just the usual contraband of brandy and lace. They would bring adventure, romance and danger in the form of a mysterious, wounded, young man . . .

  Flame-Coloured Taffeta

  Rosemary Sutcliff

  Chapter 1: ‘Spanish Ladies’

  THE LITTLE LOST cottage in the woods by Denman’s Rife had been empty and hearth-cold so long that nobody remembered it was there at all. Its one earth-floored room had still the remains of a hearth in it, and at the hearth end, ragged wings of thatch still clung to the weather-rotted rafters, making a kind of rough shelter; but save for the wind-stunted oak and crack willow and hawthorn that crowded it round and linked branches above it, the other end, the doorway end, had no roof at all.

  But last summer Damaris Crocker from Carthagena Farm and Peter Ballard from the Vicarage, who knew the woods better than almost anybody except Genty Small the Wise Woman, had found it when they were looking for a badger’s holt. They had taken it for their own, and furnished it with an old blanket and some candle ends and a couple of cast-off cooking pots and the like; and so the place had a kind of secret life of its own again, sometimes even a small fire on the hearth, carefully chosen and laid to make no tell-tale smoke. Also it had a name—two in fact—for Damaris had instantly called it Joyous Gard after Sir Lancelot’s castle in the big brown leather book called le Morte d’Arthur, at home, while Peter who considered that too romantic called it Tumbledown.

  This spring it was giving shelter to an injured vixen, penned there until her paw, caught in a trap, should be mended enough to let her go. Mrs Ballard at the Vicarage would never have given her house-room because of her smell, while John Crocker, being a farmer and in the midst of the lambing season at that, looked on all foxes as enemies. So Damaris and Peter had her safe in the ruined cottage, and visited her as and when they could.

  Damaris had just been there, with a bag of household scraps hidden under her dark green cloak, and fed the little vixen and refilled her water bowl from the spring nearby, and looked at her paw, which was healing nicely. It was Peter’s turn really, but, though he was at home because of some fever that had closed the school in Chichester where he was a weekly border, he was, greatly to his disgust, having to do extra Latin with his father; and anyway, Aunt Selina had sent her to take a clutch of ducks’ eggs to old Mrs Farrington at the Big House, and the two trips were easily combined if you took the old half-lost track through the woods instead of going round by the lanes.

  Snowball, her fat white pony standing patiently where she had left him hitched to a goat willow beside the track, swung his head and whinnied softly in greeting. Damaris whinnied softly back—she could whinny quite well, well enough to satisfy Snowball, anyway—and unhitched him, loosing a cloud of catkin-pollen yellow as sunshine over them both; and leading him to the nearby oak stump that made a convenient mounting block, climbed into the saddle and headed for home.

  Where the track climbed up into a narrow lane, she reined in for a moment and sat looking northward. She loved the view from that spot, where the land rose a little, across the farmland and the trees of the Manhood and the wandering inlets of the sea, to where Chichester Cathedral spire rose against the wave-lift line of the Downs. She loved that view in any weather and at all times of year, but most of all on a day like this one, under wide, sweeping March skies, broken sunlight and shadow drifting across the still bare woods, and the Cathedral spire coming and going as the light changed.

  And as she sat there, she heard far away down the lane, the sound of a fiddle; and the fiddler playing a tune she knew well. Nearer and nearer it drew, and then round the corner from the direction of the village came the tatterdemalion figure with a patch over one eye, of Shadow Mason, his fiddle tucked under his chin, weaving from side to side, and playing as he went.

  Damaris sang the familiar words inside her head:

  ‘Farewell and adieu to ye fair Spanish ladies,

  Farewell and adieu to ye Ladies of Spain,

  For we’ve received orders to sail for old England,

  And perhaps we may never more see you again.’

  Shadow Mason was an old sailor who had served fifteen years in the Royal Navy and lost an eye fighting the French long ago. Maybe that was why he seemed to like ‘Spanish Ladies’ better than all the working chanties that helped forward the work of the merchant ships. The King’s ships, he had once told Damaris, did not need chanties because having a fighting crew on board, they had enough men to handle the sails and capstan without.

  ‘We’ll rant and we’ll roar, like true Bri-hitish sailors,

  We’ll range and we’ll roam far over salt seas,

  Until we strike soundings in the Channel of old England,

  From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues.’

  He always played that tune whenever he was drunk, and almost always with that odd break like a hiccup, somewhere in the chorus.

  He was past her now, and weaving his way on towards Itchenor. Damaris sat listening while the tune faded into the distance.

  ‘The first land we made, it was known as the Dodman,

  Next Rame Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight

  We sailed past Beachy, past Fairlight and Dungeness,

  And then we bore up for. . . .’

  She shook the reins and turned Snowball’s head for home.

  The farmhouse of Carthagena sat long and low and companionable in the first fading of the March twilight, sideways on to the lane and separated from it by a low flint wall, and a tamarisk hedge that tossed and streamed like a breaking wave where the wind blew through it. Damaris passed the hedge with its gate into the narrow front garden where the first half-wild daffodils were in flower, and turned into the steading yard beyond.

  Caleb Henty the horseman came out at the sound of Snowball’s hooves on the cobbles, and lifted her down from the pony’s back. That was when Damaris, pausing to watch them go while she shook out her bunched-up skirts, saw the cross chalked on the stable door.

  She had not lived all her twelve years in smuggling country without knowing what that meant. There was a Run on tonight; need for horses to serve as pack beasts and mounts for the escort riders taking the cargo inland to the hides for safe storing until they could be got away to London town.

  A little cold thrill of excitement ran through her.

  John Crocker her father did not hold with smugglers or smuggling, but he always left the stable door unlocked on nights when the chalk cross appeared on it. Better that than risk having the stable fired with the horses inside it. Damaris could not believe that Caleb—who generally came to work looking as though he had not been near his bed on mornings after a run—would fire the stable with Daisy and Dolly and Beauty and Swallow
and Snowball and the rest inside it, but her father said it was not just their own people: men came from far away inland to take charge of the pack-trains. So he left the stable door open and asked no questions, and in the morning Daisy and Dolly and the others would be there, mired and weary but perfectly safe. Sometimes a keg of brandy, too, by way of payment, though John Crocker always handed that straight over to the authorities. Snowball was never taken: he was too small and maybe he would show up too clearly, even in the dark.

  Little brown Caleb, plodding across the steading yard with Snowball nuzzling at his bowed shoulder, began to whistle absent-mindedly

  ‘Farewell and adieu to ye fair Spanish ladies,

  Farewell and adieu. . . .’

  And something opened with a small soft click in Damaris’s head, so that suddenly she knew what she had never guessed before: that Shadow Mason playing ‘Spanish Ladies’ in the lane, with that odd hiccup in the chorus, and the chalk cross on the stable door were part of the same thing.

  Caleb broke off in his whistling, as though suddenly noticing what he did, and turned in the stable doorway to call back to her scoldingly, ‘Ged ’long wid ’ee now, Mess Damares, ye’ll be late for supper else, an’ Company in t’ parlour, too.’

  ‘Who, Caleb?’

  ‘Mus’ Aylmer.’

  ‘Mr Aylmer’s not company,’ Damaris told him. Luke Aylmer was farm bailiff to young Mr Farrington at the Big House, and when he came to talk over farming matters with Father he would often stay on to eat with them afterwards. But she hitched up her basket and scurried across to the narrow archway that gave onto drying green and dairy yard and kitchen door, untying the neck strings of her cloak as she ran.

  She did not say anything about the chalk cross or the fiddle tune, at supper in the candlelit parlour, for another thing she had learned during her twelve years in smuggling country was that one did not talk about such things. Anyhow, she had been well brought up and knew about not speaking until she was spoken to, at least in company, even when the company was Mr Aylmer, who scarcely counted as company at all. And that evening Mr Aylmer was still busy talking farming matters with Father, and only spoke to her once. That was just about the time they had finished with the brace of ducks and Father was carving the leg of mutton while Aunt Selina who kept house for them, cut the raised pie, and in a lull in the farm talk Mr Aylmer turned to her and said, ‘Well, Mistress Damaris’ (He always called her Mistress Damaris, as though she were grown up: it was one of the things she liked about him, along with his round cheerful face and the beautifully curled wig he always wore over his own short red hair in church on Sundays.) ‘Well, Mistress Damaris, you look as though you’d been out in the woods looking for the spring time; aye, and you look as though you’d found it, too.’

  ‘I found five primroses in the ditch by Woodhorn Crossway,’ Damaris told him.

  ‘And I hear young Ballard is home while his school is closed with measles or the like. That’ll please you—and him too, I reckon. Young things shouldn’t be kept close-penned in school with the spring coming on.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s having to do extra Latin with his father.’

  Mr Aylmer shook his head. ‘That’ll not please him; but I suppose if he’s to follow his father into the Church . . .’

  ‘He doesn’t want to. He wants to be a farmer,’ Damaris said; and then rather wished that she had not, because she and Peter did not generally go round telling each other’s private business to other people.

  Her father put another large slice of mutton on Mr Aylmer’s plate, and said, ‘And sure enough he’d make a better farmer than ever he will a parson.’

  ‘Oh aye, comes up and gives you a hand here at Carthagena, I was hearing.’

  ‘When he gets the chance—at harvest time and lambing. Holidays and weekends and when school has the measles. He’s got a real feel for the land.’

  They had forgotten Damaris, and began discussing the prospects for the lambing season.

  But Damaris had caught the faint note of regret in her father’s voice when he spoke of Peter having a feel for the land; and watching his nice bony wind-burned face with the fine crinkles round his eyes, while she ate her own pie, she felt, as she sometimes did, a little guilty that she was not a boy to carry on farming Carthagena after him.

  But though she did not speak of them, she went on thinking about the fiddle tune and the chalked cross off and on all evening. And when she had gone up to her little room under the eaves, and undressed for bed, and kind fat Aunt Selina had come surging upstairs to hear her prayers, and surged away again taking the candle with her, she slipped out of bed again and, crossing to the small pale square of window, opened it and leaned out. The chill of the March night whispered through her white cotton nightgown, and she shivered, but the shiver was not really for the cold.

  She could see out across the dipping roofs of the steading yard, and the open level of South Field, where Caleb had been at the spring ploughing with Daisy and Dolly that day, the trees of the Manhood dark in the starlight. The Main Wood, people had called it once, the dense fleece of woodland covering the broad tongue of land that reached south of Chichester into the sea at Selsey. Now it was cut up by farmland spreading from the coastwise villages until in places it was just pockets and patches and wild-duck streamers of wind-shaped oak and elm and hawthorn and willow. But still the whole district was called the Manhood, and still it had, at least for Damaris, a kind of magic about it.

  It was looking very magical now, very still under the stars, for the wind of the early evening had quite died away. But the Manhood was only waiting: it would be busy enough later on, in its own secret way. Somewhere off-shore a lugger would be lying at anchor, and the small shallow-draught boats would be coming ashore with kegs of tobacco and French brandy and Holland’s gin, and maybe bales of silk or cases of tea to be loaded onto the waiting horses. And presently the laden pack-train with their escort riders would be trotting away into the dark.

  Damaris turned her thoughts carefully away from the Run, to look up at the stars over the Manhood. It was the stars really that had brought her to the window, despite the tune of ‘Spanish Ladies’ running in her head. If you could count seven stars for seven nights together, and then you made a wish, your wish was sure to come true. It was surprising how hard it was to do, because you hardly ever got seven clear nights in an unbroken string. But this time the nights had held clear, and the stars of this seventh night were hanging bright above the trees with no more than a wisp of cloud here and there among them. One bright star hung low over the great elm tree at the corner of Dinder Meadow; a small but diamond-blue star lower still, so low that it might have been a sea light. On second thoughts perhaps it was a sea light, so she let that one go, just to be on the safe side, and chose another, a little higher up. There were plenty to choose from, so she chose with care, as she might have chosen small wayside flowers for a nosegay. A soft rather fuzzy looking star all by itself in the mid heaven; another that shook clear of the barn roof even as she looked, as though it had come hurrying to be included. That made four. Damaris left the southward facing window and went to the little corner window at the foot of her bed that faced westward over the moss-cushioned roof of the brew-house and into the heart of the big mulberry tree that hung its branches out over the lane.

  She picked her last three stars through the still bare branches of the mulberry tree, from where they hung above the creeks and inlets of Chichester Harbour. Then she covered her face with her hands very much as though she were saying her prayers in church, and wished with all the strength of wishing that was in her, for a flame-coloured taffeta petticoat.

  Rather a small wish, seemingly, to make so much of, but Damaris had made it whenever she sneezed before breakfast or met a piebald horse or saw one of the shooting stars that sometimes arched over the Manhood on winter nights, ever since the gypsies had come, more than two years ago. That had been at harvest time, and she had been allowed in to the Harvest Supper i
n the great tithe barn, though it was long past her bed-time, and a gypsy girl in a flame-coloured petticoat had come and danced on the raised threshing floor in the midst of the place, to the fiddling of a little brown man with very white teeth who had taken his battered hat round for pennies afterward. Other people might only have seen a gypsy with bright eyes and brown flickering feet, dancing in a bright petticoat that was dirty and draggle-tailed. But Damaris had seen joy itself dancing among the corn sheaves in the leaping and flickering light of the lanterns and the stars beyond the great high wagon doorway that seemed to be dancing too. And that was what she still remembered even now that she was more than two years older.

  But nobody understood, not Father nor Aunt Selina, nor even Peter who understood most of the things she told him. ‘Girls!’ Peter had said, and Father and Aunt Selina had laughed kindly and said that it was a foolish fancy and a flame-coloured petticoat would be quite unsuitable for a little girl. So she had never mentioned it again, but she had gone on wishing for the thing which to her somehow stood for all the joy and laughter and beauty and shine of the world.

  Her mother would have understood, the mother who had insisted when she was born on giving her the beautiful old Puritan name of Damaris to make up for having a surname like Crocker. But her mother had died so long ago that Damaris could scarcely remember her now.

  She left the window and dived into bed, pulling the blankets to her chin and curling up like an earwig.

  Usually she fell asleep at once, but tonight she lay awake for a long time, listening to the sounds of the old house settling for its own sleep round her. On stormy nights Carthagena seemed to remember the time when its timbers had been part of a Spanish galleon wrecked on the coast nearby as the great Armada drove up-channel; but on quiet nights it seemed to remember back beyond that, to the time when they had been part of a forest, and then it would settle as a tree settles into its own roots and the ground that it has grown from, giving shelter as a wide-branched tree gives it, to all its living things, not only to its humans, but to its beasts in the nearby steading yard, to True the yard-dog and Sukie the tabby cat, to the mice behind the wainscot and the bats in the roof and the swallows who had their nests under the eaves in summer . . .